CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonfilevariables
Baktaawar
Baktaawar

Reputation: 7490

How to access variables values (observations) in a data file using variable names in python

I wanted to have some education on how do we access the variable values(observation for a particular variable in a file using the variable names.

So my question is this:

Suppose I have a file with four variables and the following example data. 

ID  Name   Marks  Rank
1   Tom     76      3
2   Dick    95      2
3   Harry   97      1

Now instead of accessing the data values of each variable above by first removing the first line(Variable Name) using fob.readline() method and then iterating the remaining line using a for loop, I want to use the variable name present in the file to access the values for that variable.

So if I want to access '1' from the variable ID, can we do it by just using the variable name ID here using some function/method or a way?

I guess what I am trying to find out is that instead of reading each line of a data file and storing it as a list, is it possible to access the observation/records in a data file using just the variable names of that data?

Like in SAS or other statistical tool if I use the variable name in a SAS Data Step, we can access the values of that variable for each observation. So is it possible to access values of a variable using the variable name? Like ID[0] , ID[1] etc or anything similar can give us each observation value in that variable? I know ID[0], ID[1] etc wont work but this might give a drift what I am asking.

This actually helps as in a file with many variables we might want to use a variable name to access the data values in that file in case we are running any algorithm on that data.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1829

Answers (1)

sloth
sloth

Reputation: 101072

Given that you file really looks like

ID  Name   Marks  Rank
1   Tom     76      3
2   Dick    95      2
3   Harry   97      1

you can create a DataFrame with Pandas' read_csv function:

data = read_csv('your_data.txt', sep=r'\s+')

Now you can access the values the easy way:

>>> data
   ID   Name  Marks  Rank
0   1    Tom     76     3
1   2   Dick     95     2
2   3  Harry     97     1
>>> data.Marks
0    76
1    95
2    97
Name: Marks
>>> data.Name[2]
'Harry'

Upvotes: 2

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